Over the past year, our CEO Guillaume has interviewed more than 25 trailblazing founders and investors shaping the future of climate tech. In these conversations, we’ve explored their career paths, uncovered the key ingredients that fueled their startups or VC firms, and—through our exclusive “Secret Sauce” segment— discovered how they balance hustle with health, as well as their top reading recommendations for aspiring climate tech leaders.
We’ve now compiled these 15 must-read books, organized into categories for every stage of your journey:
If you are looking for books more generally about climate tech, check out our post on 30+ Climate Tech Must-Reads
We hope these books can be of use to you in your climate journey.
With care,
The Startup Basecamp Team
🏗️ Building your Startup
The Hard Thing about Hard Things – Ben Horowitz
The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare. There are lots of people talking about how great it is to start a business, but only Ben Horowitz is brutally honest about how hard it is to run one.
Recommended by: Mario Schmitt, Co-Founder @ ecoLocked
Arnaud de la Tour, CEO @ Hello Tomorrow
Ivan Landan, CEO @ Marina Digital
Zero to One – Peter Thiel
In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.
Recommended by: Phoebe Wang – Investment Partner @ Amazon Climate Pledge Fund
A venture capitalist draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and as an executive at Uber to address how tech’s most successful products have solved the dreaded “cold start problem”—by leveraging networks effects to launch and scale towards billions of users.
Recommended by: Alba Forns, Co-founder @ Climatize
🙋 Personal Development, Leadership & Productivity
Principles – Ray Dalio
Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.
Recommended by: Katie Hoffman, Partner @ Regeneration VC
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R. Covey
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, service, and human dignity–principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.
Recommended by Tim Fronzek, Co-founder & CEO @ Nosh Bio
Quiet – Susan Cain
In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.
Recommended by: Helen Lin, Partner @ At One Ventures
Lateral Thinking – Edward de Bono
Lateral thinking is all about freeing up your imagination. Through a series of special techniques, in groups or working alone, Edward de Bono shows how to stimulate the mind in new and exciting ways.
Soon you will be looking at problems from a variety of angles and offering up solutions that are as ingenious as they are effective. You will become much more productive and a formidable thinker in your own right.
Recommended by: Ranjeet Bhalerao, Co-Founder and CEO @ MapMortar
Connecting the Dots – Dr. Christian Bush
Dr Christian Busch has spent a decade exploring how, if acted upon, unexpected encounters can enhance our worldview, expand our social circles and create new professional opportunities. In this book, Christian reveals the secrets behind the hidden force that rules the universe: serendipity.
Recommended by: Xavier Xarras, Founding Partner @ 4P Capital
Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health – Christopher M. Palmer
Brain Energy explains this new understanding of mental illness in detail, from symptoms and risk factors to what is happening in brain cells. Palmer also sheds light on the new treatment pathways this theory opens up—which apply to all mental disorders, including anxiety, depression, ADHD, alcoholism, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, autism, and even schizophrenia. Brain Energy pairs cutting-edge science with practical advice and strategies to help people reclaim their mental health.
Recommended by: Xavier Xarras, Founding Partner @ 4P Capital
Factfulness – Hans Rosling
In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).
Recommended by: Martin Schichtel, Founder & CEO @ Kraftblock
🌎 Energy, Climate & Sustainability
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster – Bill Gates
With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, Bill Gates has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet’s slide to certain environmental disaster and gives a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face.
Recommended by: Albert Bielinko, Partner @ Tesltra Ventures
Speed & Scale – John Doerr
With clear-eyed realism and an engineer’s precision, Doerr lays out the practical actions, global ambitions, and economic investments we need to avert climate catastrophe. Guided by real-world solutions, Speed & Scale features unprecedented, firsthand accounts from climate leaders and dozens of intrepid policymakers, innovators, and scientists.In Speed & Scale, Doerr presents a compelling 10-step plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050–the global goal we need to reach to ensure a livable Earth for generations to come.
Recommended by: Alex Laplaza, Partner @ Lowercarbon Capital
Solar energy, once a niche application for a limited market, has become the cheapest and fastest-growing power source on earth. What’s more, its potential is nearly limitless–every hour the sun beams down more energy than the world uses in a year. But in Taming the Sun, energy expert Varun Sivaram warns that the world is not yet equipped to harness erratic sunshine to meet most of its energy needs. And if solar’s current surge peters out, prospects for replacing fossil fuels and averting catastrophic climate change will dim.
Recommended by: Meera Clarke, Investor @ Redpoint Ventures
The Grid: The Frying Wires Between Americans & our Future – Gretchen Bakke
Cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke unveils the many facets of America’s energy infrastructure, its most dynamic moments and its most stable ones, and its essential role in personal and national life. The grid, she argues, is an essentially American artifact, one which developed with us: a product of bold expansion, the occasional foolhardy vision, some genius technologies, and constant improvisation. Most of all, her focus is on how Americans are changing the grid right now, sometimes with gumption and big dreams and sometimes with legislation or the brandishing of guns.
Recommended by: Meera Clarke, Investor @ Redpoint Ventures
The Overstory – Richard Powers
The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of – and paean to – the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Recommended by: Francesca Whitehead, VP @ Climate Tech Investment Fund
Looking for more inspiration?
We give you all the books recommended by climate tech founders and investors to give you a better understanding of how we got here and inspire you toward climate action.
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